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Tuesday, July 31, 2018

The DVDs of this 2008 mini-series made for HBO sat unwatched
on our shelves for years, but recently we were in the mood for a historical
drama and finally watched it. Often when we watch a historical movie or TV
show, I have a feeling of “Been there, wrote that”, because I’ve written about
so many different time periods. That’s definitely the case in the few two
episodes of JOHN ADAMS, which cover the build-up to the Revolutionary War
between 1770 and 1776. I dealt with a lot of the same material in my series
PATRIOTS (six novels published by Bantam Books under the pseudonym Adam
Rutledge), which ended on July 4, 1776.

Of course, there are some differences, too. In my books, most of the action—the
Boston Tea Party, the Battle of Bunker Hill, the capture of the British cannon
at Fort Ticonderoga—took place on-screen, but since John Adams himself didn’t
take part in any of that, in the mini-series we hear about those historic
events but don’t witness them.

What we get instead is people talking about stuff. Lots and lots of people
talking about stuff. The saving grace of JOHN ADAMS, along with its good acting
and very high production values, is that the things being discussed are mostly
interesting, and the dialogue is well-written. There’s no getting around the
fact, though, that this mini-series is pretty slow and dry. Thankfully, it goes
on to cover the war itself and everything else that happens afterward: George
Washington’s presidency, Adams’ own term as president, the various power
struggles between him, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, and
others. I don’t know as much about that era, so most of it kept me intrigued.

There’s also a fair amount of soap opera—alcoholism, sibling rivalry, vaulting
ambition, disease, and tragedy—all of it historically accurate for the most
part, because real life often is a soap opera. But the script never lets things
get too lurid and shies away from any really over-the-top moments.

Paul Giamatti plays John Adams and Laura Linney plays his wife Abigail, and their
lifelong love story is really at the heart of this series. They each do a good
job, as does the rest of the cast. Slow though it may be, JOHN ADAMS is a
decent slice of history and I’m glad we finally watched it.

If you want plenty of powder-burning action and some real soap opera, though, I
recommend that you read my PATRIOTS novels. (Sorry for the commercial.)

Monday, July 30, 2018

I’m never going to write an autobiography. For one thing, I
don’t have the time and energy, and for another, it seems a little pretentious
for a hack writer to be doing such a thing. Also, let’s be honest here. I’ve
read a lot of books, watched a lot of movies, and spent a lot of time in a room
by myself typing. There you go. JAMES REASONER: HIS LIFE AND TIMES. The End.

However, if you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know I wax nostalgic from
time to time, and in doing so quite a bit lately it occurred to me that I ought
to start a series of such posts that are sort of autobiographical in
nature. If nothing else, it gets some of my memories down in a bit less
transitory form, and they might provide a little entertainment for some of you
or make you think back to your own younger years. And of course, one of the
great advantages of doing these as blog posts is that you can roll your eyes
and skip them and I’ll never know the difference.

I’m going to begin with the picture above. That’s an aerial photo of Azle,
Texas, taken in 1938. Now, before you think, “Just how old are you, anyway?”, let me say that my parents didn’t move to Azle
until the early Fifties, right after I was born. So that photo predates me by
more than a decade. However, some of those buildings were still there when I
was growing up in Azle in the Fifties and Sixties, and some of them are still there.

The two-story white building in the lower right portion of the picture? That’s
one of the oldest buildings still standing in Azle. I believe it was originally
MacDonald’s Grocery Store, and after that it was Stribling’s Drug Store. By the
early Sixties, it was Tompkins’ Drug Store. There was a spinner rack of comic
books, and I bought a bunch of DENNIS THE MENACE comic books there, along with
issues of the DC war comics OUR ARMY AT WAR and OUR FIGHTING FORCES. The Odd
Fellows lodge met on the second floor, and around on the side, for a while,
there was a small lending library where you could check out books for, I think,
ten cents a week.

After the drug store moved to a new strip shopping center at the other end of
town (where I bought even more comic books and paperbacks), the building became
the home of C&W Electronics, a TV repair shop. Azle had three such shops
for a long time: C&W on Main Street downtown, Jimmy Chandler’s out on the
Boyd Highway, and my dad’s shop, where he worked out of our house on Hankins
Drive. C&W was there for a long time, and after it went out of business the
building sat vacant for ages. A few years ago, a For Sale sign went up on it,
and I thought, “Crap. Somebody’s going to buy it and tear it down.” They’d
already torn down the Red Top Café, just up the street, which dated back to the
1870s and started its existence as a saloon. But no, the building is still
there, and these days it’s Red’s Burger House. I go in there to pick up burgers
sometimes, and I still know approximately where the comic book spinner rack
stood. It’s a good feeling.

Now, diagonally across the street on the corner is a two-story stone building. It was fairly
new when that photo was taken in ’38, I believe. A local couple named Jim and
Eula Nation built it. I don’t know the original purpose, but in the early
Sixties there was a barber shop on the first floor and a snow cone stand on the
corner of the parking lot during the summer. I never went to the barber shop
(my dad and I got our hair cut at Hukill’s, across the street, in a building
that wasn’t there yet in ’38), but I did eat a lot of snow cones from that
stand. Then the building was vacant for a while, and in the mid-Sixties, the
Azle Public Library, which had gotten started a few years earlier in a small
space also across the street, moved in. Mrs. Nation, who still owned the
building, was the librarian. I was already working at the library by that time,
first as a volunteer and then as a modestly salaried employee (I made enough to
buy more comic books and paperbacks!), so I worked there until, I think, 1969.
In the mid-Seventies, the library moved into a new building out on the highway,
not far from the hospital. The stone building on Main Street is now the Azle
Historical Museum, where the original of this aerial photo now hangs, or at
least it did the last time I was in there.

See the road that turns off of Main Street next to the museum building and
curves up and to the left out of the picture? The second building on the right,
the little white house, was still there as recently as a year or two ago, but I
believe it was jacked up and moved out. I don’t know where it is now.

Across from that house, on the left side of the road (Church Street), you can
see the steeple and part of Azle Christian Church. The building still sits on
that property, although in a slightly different place now, and is the church’s
Fellowship Hall. Follow Church Street on around, and that clump of trees and
cluster of buildings on the left is what was then Azle’s only school. It’s a
sprawling stone building famous in these parts as the Rock School. When I went
there in the Sixties for sixth, seventh, and eighth grades, it was Azle Junior
High. When my daughters attended fifth and sixth grade there, it was Azle
Elementary. But whatever its official name, it was and always will be the Rock
School.

There are a few other buildings in Azle old enough to have been in this picture
that are further out. About half a mile to the south is Ash Creek Baptist
Church, where a building that dates from 1898 is now Fellowship Hall. When I
was a kid it was still the church’s main building, and that was where I
attended the first church services I remember. Livia and I also had our wedding
shower in that building. Farther out the same road the church is on is an old
house that was built in the 1850s, within a decade after the first settlers
moved into the area. When I was a kid, an old log cabin built in the 1840s was
still standing on property belonging to the family of a friend of mine. I
remember seeing it. I don’t know if it was torn down or fell down, but it’s
long gone, like the Red Top up on Main Street. I’m sure there are other private
homes in the area that date back that far, but I don’t know the details on all
of them.

Since the Sixties, a four-lane highway runs right through the middle of the
area in the picture. Most of that farm land you see stretching into the
distance? Covered with houses, of course. Things changed a lot during that era,
but in the Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies, Azle was still a darned good place
to live and grow up. One thing about living in one place all your life, every
time you go anywhere, you drive right past all those old memories and they come
alive again in your mind.

Sunday, July 29, 2018

The usual eye-catching cover by Herbert Morton Stoops leads off this issue of BLUE BOOK, and inside are some familiar names, too. As often happened, H. Bedford-Jones has three stories in this issue, one under his own name and one each as by Michael Gallister and Gordon Keyne. Fulton Grant and Nelson Bond, two more BLUE BOOK regulars, are on hand, too, and there are also stories by Howard Rigsby, William Bryon Mowery, Charles L. Clifford, and Tracy Richardson. BLUE BOOK was one of the classiest of the pulps, with consistently excellent stories.

Saturday, July 28, 2018

A lot of WESTERN STORY covers seem to capture the moment just before gunplay erupts. That's the case with this one. I think it's a nice dramatic scene and I like it quite a bit. There's a lot to like inside the issue, too, with stories by Norman A. Fox, Harry F. Olmsted, William Heuman, Bennett Foster, and David Lavender, one of the few Western pulp writers I actually met before he passed away. Elmer Kelton, Bill Gulick, Thomas Thompson, Wayne C. Lee, and Fred Grove are others who come to mind. There may have been more.

Friday, July 27, 2018

MIDSHIPMAN BOLITHO AND THE AVENGER is the second novel, chronologically, in the 18th
Century naval adventure series written by Douglas Reeman under the pseudonym
Alexander Kent. I really enjoyed the first one, RICHARD BOLITHO, MIDSHIPMAN, so
I was looking forward to the sequel and it didn’t let me down.

As this book opens, 17-year-old Richard Bolitho has returned to England from
his pirate-chasing adventure in the previous novel and has leave to travel to
his family home in Cornwall to celebrate Christmas with his family. His friend
and fellow midshipman Martyn Dancer goes with him. But no sooner do they arrive
than a dead man is found on the beach of a nearby cove, then the King’s ship Avenger, under the command of none other
than Bolitho’s older brother Hugh, shows up. Hugh has been sent to crack down
on smugglers and wreckers working along the coastline, and since he’s short on
officers, he presses his younger brother and Dancer into service on the Avenger.

There’s some action at sea, including a really excellent climactic chase and
battle, but most of this adventure takes place on land as the Bolitho brothers
try to break up the smuggling ring. The twist ending isn’t entirely a surprise,
but it still works pretty well. Reeman writes great action scenes, and I
continue to be impressed by how tight his writing is and how he spins his yarns
at such a fast pace. No bloated historical novel here. This is good,
old-fashioned swords and pistols high adventure, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I
have the next novel in the series on hand, and I suspect I’ll be getting to it
soon.

Tuesday, July 24, 2018

As often happens on this blog, you’re going to have to put
up with some nostalgia before I get to the actual subject of this post. Or you
can just scroll on down, I won’t mind, honest.

I’ve mentioned the Eagle Drive-In Theater before. When I was growing up, it was
only about a quarter of a mile from my parents’ house if you cut through back
yards, a field, and the parking lot of the Western Lodge Motel. I saw a lot of
movies there. Somebody always took me until I was about ten years old, but
after that point I usually walked, sometimes with other kids from the
neighborhood, sometimes by myself. (Times were different then. Those of you who
are old enough know that, and those who aren’t, just take my word for it.)

The Eagle had a promotion during the summer called Merchant’s Night, which was,
I believe, on Tuesday each week. Businesses around town would buy bunches of really cheap
tickets and give them away to their customers with purchases made in their
stores. With those tickets, you could get in free on Merchant’s Night. The
double feature was always older movies (cheaper for the theater to rent, I’m
sure), so you got a lot of Elvis and Audie Murphy movies from four or five
years earlier.

You also got THE GHOST AND MR. CHICKEN.

I loved this Don Knotts movie (the first one he made after leaving THE ANDY
GRIFFITH SHOW) when I saw it as a kid. Svengoolie ran it on his show a few
weeks ago, so I had to record it and watch it for the first time in almost 50
years. Knotts plays Luther Heggs, a typesetter on the local paper in the small
Kansas town of Rachel. He has an ambition to be an actual reporter, though. One
of the local legends involves a creepy old house in town where a notorious
murder/suicide occurred 20 years earlier. The old man who owned the house
murdered his beautiful young wife in a fit of insane jealousy, then climbed
into a tall tower attached to the house, played crazy tunes on the organ there,
and finally leaped to his death.

So who do you think gets the job of spending the night in the murder house on the
twentieth anniversary of the crime? Actually, how do you think the rest of this
movie is going to go? Because you’ll probably be able to predict everything
that happens in it, right down to the identity of the bad guy.

But here’s the important thing: It doesn’t matter. This is a wonderful film,
and I had a big smile on my face the whole way through it. It’s just a
beautiful snapshot of small town Americana, from the diner where the citizens
of Rachel eat to the bandstand in the town park. I’ve been known to say that a
little of Don Knotts goes a long way, but he’s great in this one, doing all of
his usual nervous routines but pulling back from them when he needs to. Dick
Sargent is the owner and editor of the newspaper, Skip Homeier is the arrogant
reporter who makes life miserable for Knotts’ character, and Joan Staley is the
beautiful girl-next-door Knotts has a crush on. The supporting cast is full of
familiar faces: Hal Smith (Otis from THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW, playing the town
drunk here, too), Burt Mustin (from LEAVE IT TO BEAVER), the great Charles
Lane, and many more.

My friends and I loved this movie when we were kids. We spent weeks hollering
“Attaboy, Luther!” (the movie’s most famous running joke) at each other and
thinking it was hilarious. It’s still pretty funny. Watching it now, I still
love it. I know intellectually that those days really weren’t simpler, better
times for everybody, but they were for me and THE GHOST AND MR. CHICKEN did a
great job of transporting me back there for a while. Attaboy, indeed.

Sunday, July 22, 2018

You just don't run across stories with titles like "Fokker Dust" anymore. Thomson Burtis was a well-known writer of aviation and air-war stories, but I don't believe I've ever read anything by him. Also in this issue of WAR BIRDS are stories by O.B. Myers, another prolific and well-regarded aviation pulpster, Allan R. Bosworth, an excellent Western author who wrote a little bit of everything for the pulps, William E. Barrett, best remembered for the novel THE LILIES OF THE FIELD, and several authors whose names are unfamiliar to me. I've never really read much from the aviation pulps compared to some of the other genres, but I've generally enjoyed what I've read.

Saturday, July 21, 2018

As I've said before, no poker games ever ended peacefully in the Old West, at least according to the Western pulps. This issue of NEW WESTERN is another example. Although violence hasn't broken out yet, you just know it's about to. So while the brawl's going on, you can read stories by Wayne D. Overholser ("Gun-Cure for Lava City" is a great title), D.B. Newton, C. William Harrison, Thomas Thompson, M. Howard Lane, Ralph Yergen, Theodore J. Roemer, and Charles Hammill, an author I've never heard of. Any Western pulp with Overholser, Newton, Harrison, and Thompson is going to be worth reading.

Friday, July 20, 2018

I’ve been aware of the Hank Janson series for many years
(and the gorgeous covers by Reginald Heade), but never got around to reading one
until now. Although it might not have been the wisest course of action, for
reasons I’ll get into below, I started with the very first Hank Janson novella,
WHEN DAMES GET TOUGH, published in 1946.

Some quick background: Stephen D. Frances was a young, struggling writer/publisher
in England who had been writing what were known as gangster stories, lurid,
hardboiled tales set in America, mostly written by authors who had never been
in America and had only a loose grasp of American slang and geography. As a
publisher, Frances found himself in need of urgent need of a 15,000 word novella
over a weekend, and not having anyone else to do it, he wrote it himself,
dictating it to a secretary. Not only is the protagonist named Hank Janson,
that was the by-line on it, as well.

This was WHEN DAMES GET TOUGH, a fast-paced, first-person yarn narrated by a
traveling salesman (of ladies’ cosmetics) named Hank Janson. Hank happens upon
a beautiful young blonde being interrogated and tortured by thugs, so naturally
he wades in and rescues her, which lands him up to his neck in a criminal scheme
involving black market goods (still a hot topic in those days just following
World War II), mistaken identity, yet another beautiful blonde, and more than
one attempt on his life.

This novella is certainly not without its flaws. Frances’s American tough-guy
patter is less convincing at this point than that of James Hadley Chase (Rene
Raymond) or Carter Brown (Alan G. Yates), the other two English authors I’ve
read who produced mainly American-set mystery novels. The plot is driven by several
pretty hard to swallow coincidences. And making your wise-cracking, two-fisted
hero a salesman of ladies’ cosmetics is, well, an unusual choice, to say the
least.

However . . . WHEN DAMES GET TOUGH is pretty darned entertaining. Frances’s
style may be a little crude at times, and his Americanisms may not ring true,
but dang, this yarn rockets along and is told in a distinctive voice, which I
always like. There’s plenty of action, the girls are sexy, and Hank is a
likable galoot. The Heade cover depicts an actual scene from the story with a
fair degree of accuracy (the girls are both blondes in the story). I wound up
liking this one quite a bit.

There are a couple more early novellas before Frances retooled the character as
a crime-busting reporter from Chicago, and those tales are included in an ebook
currently available, along with two short stories featuring the later
incarnation of the Janson character. I plan to read those as well and then move
on to the ebooks of the full-length novels. I’m glad these reprints are available
since the original editions are sort of hard to come by, and I want to read
more about Hank Janson.

Thursday, July 19, 2018

THE RED SCARFRoy Nichols needs to find some quick cash to keep from losing his motel. The new highway was supposed to go through, providing plenty of business, but now it's been delayed. The bank refuses to help, and his brother turns him down. Desperate and on the way back home, he catches a ride with a bickering couple named Vivian and Teece. They start drinking, then Teece gets spooked, and crashes the car. That's when Nichols discovers that his travelling companions have been carrying a briefcase full of cash. Teece appears to be dead, and Vivian confesses that they have robbed the mob, and begs him to help her escape. But to do that, Nichols will have to lie to his wife Bess...to the cops...and ultimately, to a very dangerous man named Radan.A KILLER IS LOOSEEx-cop Steve Logan is down on his luck. With a baby on the way, Logan decides to pawn his last pistol to a bartender friend. On his way, he rescues a stranger, Ralph Angers, from being hit by an oncoming bus. Angers is an eye surgeon and a Korean War vet, and he has plans to build a hospital in town. Unfortunately, he is also prepared to kill anyone and everyone who gets in the way of his plans. So when Angers manages to get a hold of Logan's Luger, he also drags his rescuer into a nightmare of murder and insanity. Logan becomes a hostage to Angers' plans, and there will be no mercy to anyone who gets in his way.This Gil Brewer double volume will be available from Stark House in a few months. That's a quote from one of my reviews on that gorgeous cover, and I'm very happy for my words to be sharing space with some beautiful artwork by Robert McGinnis. Man, when I was buying all those Carter Browns and Mike Shaynes with McGinnis covers off the spinner rack at Lester's Pharmacy when I was a kid, I never dreamed that I'd be part of a cover like that someday. This is very cool for me.Not to mention, THE RED SCARF is a great noir novel. I read and reviewed it back in 2011. But I haven't read A KILLER IS LOOSE, and I remember Bill Crider telling me about it. I thought there was a review of it on Bill's blog, but I can't find it now. Maybe we just talked about the book. But I'm sure looking forward to reading it in the near future, and when I have, I'll be writing about it here. In the meantime, this Stark House edition is available for pre-order, and like everything from Stark House, if you're a fan of great hardboiled and noir fiction, it's going to be well worth your time and money.

Wednesday, July 18, 2018

John M. Whalen’s new novel TRAGON OF RAMURA is a
sword-and-sorcery adventure in the classic mold, set in a world that seems an alternate history approximation of our own. The protagonist Tragon has
been framed for the murder of his king and is already on the run when this yarn
begins, having fallen in with the crew of the ship Orion. But he has sworn that someday he’ll return to his home of
Ramura and overthrow the sorcerer Caldec, who is responsible for all the evil
that plagues the country as well as for framing Tragon.

While in a dangerous port city, Tragon encounters an old soldier/mentor of his
named Darius who has fallen on drunken hard times. When Tragon and his
companions on the Orion are hired to
travel to a lost city and rescue the daughter of their client, Tragon decides
to sober up Darius and take him along.

The man who hires them has been to the lost city of Caiphar before, in search
of a mystical gem called the Crimson Eye. His daughter was captured during this
trip, and he barely got away. Now he has to return and rescue her before the
time rolls around for a ritual in which the city’s evil king will take her as
his wife. And of course, stealing the Crimson Eye is still on the table as
well, so in addition to hiring Tragon and his crew, the man also brings along a
group of hardened mercenaries.

Of course, the whole thing winds up being complicated by double crosses, traps,
monsters, immortal evil, a tower full of dead souls, and a beautiful high
priestess who may or may not be trustworthy. There are a lot of influences in
this book: Robert E. Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN, THE
DIRTY DOZEN . . . and plenty of Whalen’s own talent, as he spins a fast-moving
yarn with interesting characters, a lot of well-written action, and some
surprisingly poignant moments. There’s enough back-story left unresolved for a
number of sequels, too, although this novel is quite satisfying on its own.

I’ve written many times before about what I call front porch books, the sort of
thing I read sitting on the front porch of my parents’ house on long summer
days when I was a kid. TRAGON OF RAMURA, although it’s brand new, is that same
sort of pure pleasure, so I’m naming it an honorary Front Porch Book and
recommending it if you’re a fan of sword and sorcery action.

Tuesday, July 17, 2018

This movie has maybe the weirdest opening of any B-Western I've ever seen. It starts with a shot showing part of a Western pulp cover (more about this later), then a close-up of a page from a Western manuscript, then a voice-over as an actor reads from this story while the action takes place on screen. The bad guys have captured the beautiful girl and have her tied up, and then the stalwart hero shows up to rescue her. It's all silly and deliberately terrible, as we find out when we see that the old-timer reading the story is the protagonist's father, said protagonist being Western novelist Robert Morris (played by Tom Tyler). Never mind that what the guy is reading is clearly a pulp, not a book.Anyway, the old-timer makes fun of his son's writing and says that it's not realistic. The son explains that he's been invited to visit a real Western ranch and so he'll find out first hand whether or not his stories are authentic. However, the ranch in question--the Mystery Ranch of the title--is actually a dude ranch and the people running it intend to stage a lot of phony Western action to impress the visiting author. Of course, none of this works out as planned, and then a real bank robbery happens, and naturally enough, the author has to turn hero . . . and you can write the plot from that point on just as well as the actual scriptwriters did. Possibly better.Don't get me wrong. I thoroughly enjoyed this movie, although the bizarre opening sequence is the real highlight. Nobody would mistake Tom Tyler for a great actor, but he's okay and has enough screen presence to make up for a lot. Veteran heavies Charles King and George Chesebro are on hand to liven things up, and blond Roberta Gale, an actress I'm not familiar with, is really good-looking. There's some decent stunt work by Tyler and others. As usual with Hollywood, the screenwriters have no real idea how publishing works, but I'm used to that. The whole thing is a little off-kilter, but in this case, that's good.Note that there's a better known B Western from a couple of years earlier called MYSTERY RANCH. That one stars George O'Brien. There's also a Max Brand novel with the same title. This movie doesn't have anything to do with either of those.Now, about that pulp . . . As soon as I saw the opening shot, I thought it was a real pulp featured in it. You can't see anything except the middle part of the front cover, with some of the art and the word "Magazine" visible, along with the bottom of the word "Western". But something about it seemed familiar to me, and I realized it looked like it might be a cover from an issue of ALL WESTERN, published by Dell. So it was off to the Fictionmags Index, and sure enough, it's the cover from the June 1934 issue, which was probably on the stands when the movie was filmed. So somebody went down to the newsstand, bought a copy, brought it back to the studio, and ALL WESTERN made what may well be its only movie appearance. You can see the cover, which is a pretty good one and was painted by R. Farrington Elwell, below. And if you want to watch MYSTERY RANCH, the whole thing is available on YouTube, although I watched it as part of a DVD set of public domain Westerns.

Sunday, July 15, 2018

This issue of DETECTIVE NOVEL MAGAZINE features an eye-catching cover by Rudolph Belarski. And that's the purpose of a pulp cover, isn't it? The featured story in this issue is a reprint (possibly abridged) of a 1939 novel by Q. Patrick, actually Richard Webb and Hugh Wheeler, who also wrote as Jonathan Stagge and their best-known pseudonym, Patrick Quentin. There are also stories by William Campbell Gault and Arthur Leo Zagat, both top-notch pulpsters, and John L. Benton, a Thrilling Group house-name, so the author of that one was probably pretty good, too.

Saturday, July 14, 2018

The cover on this issue of FIGHTING WESTERN is just oddball enough that I really like it. Inside are stories by E. Hoffmann Price (one of his Simon Boliver Grimes series), Chuck Martin, Branch Carter, and two by Victor Rousseau, one under his own name and one as by Lew Merrill. This looks like a good issue of a generally underrated Western pulp.

Friday, July 13, 2018

I’ve written before about what I call front porch books—the
sort of book I read when I was a teenager, sitting in a lawn chair in the shade
of my parents’ front porch on summer days when it was too hot to play baseball.
THE BRONZE AXE, the first book in the long-running Richard Blade fantasy
adventure series, is definitely a front porch book. Which is not always a good
thing and is, in fact, sometimes a mixed blessing.

First some background on the series, which was packaged by Lyle Kenyon Engel
before he formed Book Creations Inc, the company I worked for many years later.
I’m going by memory here, but I seem to recall reading in an interview with
Engel that it was George Glay, the editorial director at Macfadden-Bartell
Books, who actually came up with the concept of this series. Knowing how Engel
worked, I imagine Glay said something like “How about a series mixing James
Bond with Conan?”, since those were two very popular literary figures at the
time. So Engel called up Manning Lee Stokes, one of the authors who regularly
wrote books for him, and said, “I need a series mixing James Bond with Conan”,
and then Stokes came up with everything else. I suspect that’s how it went,
anyway.

But no matter what the details of its creation, the Richard Blade series really
is James Bond meets Conan. Blade is a top agent in British Intelligence,
working for a secret division of MI6 called MI6A, which is headed up by a
spymaster known only as J. Blade is recruited as a test subject in an
experiment being conducted by gnomish scientest Lord Leighton, who hooks him up
to a supercomputer. The object of the experiment is to download all the
information in the computer directly in Blade’s brain, but there’s a glitch and
instead it hurls him into a parallel dimension that comes to be known as
Dimension X, which has all sorts of different alternate Earths in it. (I gather
that some of this is established in later books.)

In this book, THE BRONZE AXE, Blade winds up in an alternate history version of
Bronze Age England, where he rescues a beautiful princess and runs afoul of a
beautiful queen, a beautiful witch (the witches are known as Drus, obviously
inspired by Druids), and another queen who’s not really beautiful, but Blade
fools around with her anyway, as he does most of the women he encounters. When
he’s not getting laid, he fights the Dimension X equivalents of Vikings and not
surprisingly kills their leader so he can take over the dreaded sea raiders.
Then Lord Leighton fixes the problem with the computer and manages to bring him
back to good old England in the Swinging Sixties.

Stokes was one of the regular authors on the Nick Carter, Killmaster secret
agent series also packaged by Engel, and I gobbled those novels down with great
enjoyment in those days (definite front porch books). I didn’t know at the time
who was writing them, but I didn’t care, either. Now, all these decades later,
I find that Stokes’ prose hasn’t aged all that well, at least in this book. He
can get awfully long-winded and pretentious at times.

However, there are also some really good action scenes in THE BRONZE AXE, some
likable and interesting characters, and a surprising amount of humor, most of
which actually works. If I had read this when it was first published in 1969, I
suspect I would have loved it. Somehow I never saw it back then, though.
Reading it now, I still got a considerable amount of enjoyment from it, despite
being able to see its flaws.

A little more history on the series: Macfadden-Bartell published six Richard
Blade books in 1969-72, all with pretty good covers by Jack Faragasso, but that
seemed to be the end of the series. Then in 1973, Engel struck a deal with
Pinnacle Books, which had grown enormously in the past few years due to the
success of the Executioner, the Destroyer, and other men’s adventure series.
Pinnacle reprinted the six books originally published by Macfadden-Bartell,
this time with covers by Tony Destefano that I don’t like nearly as well, and
then continued on with original novels until the series totaled 37 books.
Manning Lee Stokes wrote the first eight, and Roland J. Green wrote all the books after that except for #30,
which was written by Ray Faraday Nelson. Engel, or an editor who worked for
him, talked to author Geo. W. Proctor about continuing the series, but that
never came about. After Russian reprints of the early books were successful, a
couple of Russian authors began writing their own sequels, so there are a
number of unauthorized Richard Blade novels that have only been published in
Russia and have never appeared in English.

I have the first three books and then maybe a dozen more scattered through the
rest of the series. I enjoyed THE BRONZE AXE enough that I’ll probably try to
round up the rest of the Manning Lee Stokes entries, but whether I continue
beyond that is sort of doubtful since I’m not a fan of Roland Green’s work. I’m
glad I read this one, though. It brought back enough of those old feelings to
create quite a bit of nostalgia for those days. I wouldn’t go back there
permanently, but I sure like to visit.

Thursday, July 12, 2018

A dream starts Tragon of Ramura and his friend/bodyguard Yusef Ahmed on a search for an amulet said to be the source of the most powerful magic in the universe, Their search leads them to the lost city of Caiphar and the beautiful and mysterious Sai-Ul-San, high priestess of the cult of Zoth-Amin. Tragon finds the Crimson Eye of Caiphar, but the city holds dark secrets of an evil a thousand years old that threaten to unleash a demon intent on destroying the world. Can Tragon defeat the ancient forces that rule Caiphar, or will he remain trapped forever in the Tower of Lost Souls?

Flying W Press
announces the release of John M. Whalen’s new sword and sorcery novel, TRAGON OF RAMURA. It’s a novel deeply rooted in the traditions of the sword and sorcery
genre, but which attempts to take that kind of story into a new realm.Tragon of Ramura is a character that has been around a
while. He first appeared in 2006 in a short story, “Island of Fear,” published
in Howard Andrew Jones’ Flashing Swords e-zine. “That was the first cash money
I ever got for a short story,” author John Whalen said. “Howard said he thought
I had something with the characters of Tragon and his sidekick, Yusef Ahmed. I
think he was right. So I finally gave them their own novel.”

Tragon and Yusef also were also featured in Christopher
Heath’s Artifacts and Relics anthology, and another antho, “Shadows and Light,”
published by the now defunct Pill Hill Press. They have also been published in
Greece and translated into Greek.

In TRAGON OF RAMURA, our two adventurers are in search of
the Crimson Eye of Caiphar, said to be the source of the most powerful magic in
the universe. Tragon believes he must obtain it in order to return home from
exile and combat the evil wizard who assassinated his king and framed him for
the killing. In the Lost City of Caiphar Tragon encounters the beautiful and
mysterious Sai-Ul-San, high priestess of the cult of Zoth-Amin. The priestess
agrees to help Tragon in his quest, but can they overcome the dark forces that
rule the city and defeat an ancient god who threatens to destroy the world? And
what terrible secret is the priestess hiding?

“I didn’t want to write the same old Robert E. Howard Conan
pastiche,” Whalen said. “It’s been done to death. The book has some of the
usual tropes, but they’re handled in a different way, and mixed with some
mind-bending ideas that S&S fans probably haven’t seen in this context
before. It’s a combination of horror and adventure, and some far out things.
It’s different.”

Sunday, July 08, 2018

This is a pulp I own and read recently. The upper image is a scan of my
copy, front cover damage and all, the lower a better image from the Fictionmags Index. PRIVATE DETECTIVE STORIES was published by
Trojan Publishing Corporation, the publishers of the notorious Spicy line of
pulps that eventually became the slightly toned-down Speed line. PRIVATE
DETECTIVE STORIES ran from June 1937 to December 1950. Most issues featured at
least one story by Robert Leslie Bellem and often more than one under his
various pseudonyms. Other regulars from the Spicy/Speed stable showed up
frequently, too, such as E. Hoffmann Price, Victor Rousseau (as Lew Merrill),
Hugh B. Cave (as Justin Case), and Edwin Truett Long (as Cary Moran).

The author of the lead story in this issue, the novelette “Killer Wanted—First Class”,
sold several stories to various Trojan pulps but wasn’t exactly a regular.
Geoffrey North wrote many stories for the gang pulps, starting in the early
Thirties, and also appeared in a number of other detective pulps from various
publishers before his career petered out in the mid-Fifties. That’s all I know
about him. His story is a mostly good yarn about a Louisville, Kentucky private
detective named Lackland who travels to a small town in Ohio to take on a case
involving the murder of the local sheriff. There’s a bizarre will and a big
inheritance involved, along with a live dog, a rumored ghost dog, and several
instances where Lackland gets hit on the head and knocked out. The terse
third-person prose is very good, but the plot winds up being kind of a mess,
with things being explained pretty poorly or not at all and an
ending that’s not very satisfying. If North had been able to follow through
from the good beginning, this would have been a fine story. As is, it reads
like he kind of confused himself in the telling of it, along with the reader.
Still, there’s enough good stuff in it that I’d be interested to read more by
him.

The second story, “No Blood is Bad Blood” by Henry Norton, isn’t a private
detective story at all, despite the magazine’s name. The protagonist is a
twelve-year-old girl whose father comes home from the war and is immediately
arrested for murder. The girl is convinced he couldn’t possibly be guilty and
has to find a way to expose the real killer and clear his name. It’s a little
on the mild side but well-written and entertaining. Henry Norton wrote a lot
for the detective pulps starting in the early Forties, with occasional ventures
into science fiction, before selling a few stories to the slicks late in his
career.

Talmage Powell’s name is misspelled as Talmadge Powell on both the table of
contents and the first page of his story “Tab Me for the Kill”. It’s set in the
Ybor City area of Tampa, as much of Powell’s later work would be, and a
returning war vet plays a major part in this one, too. In fact, Les Brennan is
the narrator. He was a cop in Tampa before the war and often clashed with
nightclub owner and crooked gambler Dolph Amick. Now, Amick has married the
girl Brennan intended to marry, and Brennan has come back to square accounts.
Instead he finds himself framed for murder and has to scramble to uncover the
truth. It’s a good yarn, well-written with quite a bit of plot packed into it.
I nearly always enjoy Powell’s work.

There’s no private detective in Lew Merrill’s “Nailed”, either. It’s a small
town domestic drama set in Vermont with a murder thrown in, and it’s up to the
local sheriff to solve it. Merrill was really long-time pulpster Victor
Rousseau, and I usually enjoy his stories. This one’s pretty bland, though.

“Lethal Lady” by Walton Grey continues the no private eye streak. Instead, the
protagonists in this one are lawyer Timothy Keene and his beautiful blond wife
Violet. This reads very much like a series entry, with numerous references to
other cases solved by the Keenes, but I don’t know if it is. Nor do I know who
wrote it, since Walton Grey is a house-name. Keene’s current case involves a
bizarre will (much like the first story in this issue, “Killer Wanted—First Class”)
and of course there’s a murder, but Keene and Vi don’t do much actual detective
work. However, they’re pretty good characters, with a bit of a Mr. and Mrs.
North feel to them, and I enjoyed the story even though there’s not much to it.

David Carver was a pseudonym for an author named David Redstone, who wrote for
the pulps under both those names as well as the pseudonym Paul Sherwood from
the Twenties through the Forties. I don’t know that I’ve ever encountered his
work before. His story in this issue, “The Man in the Crowd”, features
insurance investigator Tom Cooper, and insurance investigators are close enough
to private detectives that we can consider Cooper one. He’s also a returning
vet, which seems to be something of a theme in detective pulps from this era.
In this yarn, Cooper is on the trail of an arsonist, and while the plot is
really predictable, the story has a nice rhythm and flow to it, and I wound up
liking it anyway.

The issue wraps up with “The Hot Rock” by Robert Leslie Bellem. This isn’t a
Dan Turner story; in fact, it’s Bellem in a whole different mode. The
protagonist is a private eye named Ben Medwick who answers a call for help from
his ne’er-do-well brother and winds up on a bloody quest for vengeance almost
worthy of Mike Hammer. There’s a death by gruesome torture, a beautiful blonde
babe, a blind man, a fortune in missing diamonds, and some really tough action
that reminded me of Mickey Spillane. Bellem really packs a lot into this one
despite its relatively short length. Easily the best story in this issue.

So only three stories out of the seven actually feature private detectives, but
one of them is a novelette and the other two are fairly long, so I guess the
wordage is about equal between PI and non-PI stories. None of the stories are
particularly outstanding except the one by Bellem, but I didn’t skip any of
them and found them reasonably entertaining. That makes this issue of PRIVATE
DETECTIVE STORIES about average, I suppose.

Saturday, July 07, 2018

This is a pulp I own and read recently. The scan is from my
copy. I don’t know who the artist is, but if you check the lower right corner,
you’ll see that this is an Injury to a Hat cover. I’ve been reading issues of
THRILLING WESTERN for years now and always enjoy them, although there are
usually one or two stories in each issue I don’t care for.

This issue leads off (as most issues from 1940 to 1950 did) with a Walt Slade,
Texas Ranger story by Bradford Scott, who was really the highly prolific and
distinctive A. Leslie Scott. “The Sky Riders” is one of the last stories in the
pulp series. There would be only two more after it. But a few years later Scott
began writing paperback novels for Pyramid Books featuring the Walt Slade
character, mostly originals but some expansions from pulp yarns. That paperback
series ran even longer, all the way into the early Seventies. There’s a Walt
Slade novel from 1968 called THE SKY RIDERS, and while I haven’t read it, I
wouldn’t be at all surprised if it’s an expansion of this pulp novella.

This one opens with a very evocation scene involving a killing on a high
natural bridge running between two sides of a canyon. Scott always wrote good
action scenes and good descriptions of the settings, and both of those elements
are on display here. Walt Slade, an undercover Texas Ranger who most folks
believe to be the notorious outlaw El Halcon (The Hawk), witnesses that
shooting, and his investigation plunges him into the hunt for a gang of
owlhoots known as the Sky Riders because they’re usually spotted riding along
some rimrock, silhouetted against the sky.

Anybody who’s read more than one or two Walt Slade yarns will know exactly what’s
going on in this story and will pick out the hidden mastermind of the outlaws
with no trouble. The geography of the region plays a big part in the plot, as it
often does in Scott’s stories, and he handles it very well, resulting in some vivid scenes. Sure, the whole thing is formulaic, but I always enjoy Scott’s
work anyway. It’s pure comfort reading for me.

I have the opposite reaction to the Swap and Whopper series by Syl MacDowell,
which ran even longer than the Walt Slade series, starting in 1939 and
continuing until 1952. Slapstick Westerns are a hard sell for me to start with.
The Swap and Whopper stories feature a couple of saddle tramps, one tall and
skinny, the other short and fat, who always wind up in bizarre situations. Part
Mutt and Jeff, part Abbott and Costello, and well written enough by old pro Syl
MacDowell, but dang, this series just doesn’t work for me. I’ve started dozens
of them and finished only a few. The one in this issue, “The Talking Bear”, is
not one that I finished.

Nels Leroy Jorgensen wrote scores of stories during a pulp career that lasted
approximately thirty years, from the early Twenties to the early Fifties. He turned
out detective, aviation, adventure, and war stories in addition to Westerns. I
first became aware of him as a Western writer but later discovered that his
work appeared frequently in BLACK MASK during the Twenties and Thirties, most
notably with a series about a gambler named Black Burton (a series that wound
up in BLACK BOOK DETECTIVE during the Forties). Jorgensen’s novelette in this
issue, “Gunstorm on the Wagon Trail”, has a good title and the plot, about a
couple of guys who own a freight company trying to get a wagon train full of
badly needed supplies (including medicine) through a gauntlet of Mexican
bandidos and Apache renegades, is interesting as well. I thought the actual
writing was pretty bland, though, with lots of long paragraphs of the
protagonist thinking about what’s going on. I finished the story, but it never
really caught my interest much.

I’ve never read a story by Johnston McCulley that I didn’t like, and “Agency
Injun” continues that streak. It’s a minor yarn about a cavalryman trying to
prove that a friendly Indian didn’t commit a murder at an army post, but
McCulley tells it well. This one has an illustration by the great Nick
Eggenhoffer, too, which certainly doesn’t hurt anything.

I read a story by L. Kenneth Brent in an issue of THRILLING WESTERN last year
and enjoyed it. His tale in this issue, “Gunsmoke Freeze-Out”, is even better.
It’s a “small rancher vs. cattle baron” story, with the added complication that
a rustler the small rancher testified against in court has gotten out of prison
and is coming back to try to kill him. It’s a standard plot, but Brent’s
writing is good and he creates some genuine suspense along the way. I’ll be
keeping an eye out for more of his stories.

Like Nels Leroy Jorgensen, Harold F. Cruickshank had a pulp career that lasted
from the Twenties to the Fifties. During that time he wrote several hundred
stories, specializing during the first part of his career in war and air war
stories before branching out into Westerns and sports yarns. He was a highly
regarded air war writer, but I haven’t read any of those stories. In Westerns,
he had a long-running back-up series in RANGE RIDERS WESTERNS about the
settlers in Sun Bear Valley. I’ve read some of these (also known as the Pioneer
Folk series) but never cared much for them. His novelette in this issue, “Branch
Line to Hell”, is a stand-alone about a railroad surveyor who’s trying to
survey a spur line over the opposition of a ruthless local cattle baron. It’s a
good title, but unfortunately that’s the best thing about this story.
Cruickshank’s writing just doesn’t appeal to me, and all the technical details
of surveying and railroad construction are just confusing, so I wasn’t quite
sure what was going on some of the time. I think maybe I’ve read enough of
Cruickshank’s work, although I am still curious about his air war stories.

So far this issue of THRILLING WESTERN is batting .500. I’ve liked three of the
stories and disliked the other three. But there are four short stories left.

I don’t know anything about Dupree Poe except that I’ve seen his name in
various Western pulps. He sold several dozen stories to the Thrilling Group in
the late Forties and early Fifties, along with a few to MAMMOTH WESTERN and the
Ace Western pulps, WESTERN ACES and WESTERN TRAILS. His story “Hangman’s Tree”
in this issue is a little unusual for the era in that the plot revolves around
a rancher’s suspicion that his wife is having an affair with an outlaw who’s
hiding out on the ranch and pretending to be a cowhand. This sets off a string
of events that include a lynching, a visit by another outlaw, and the rancher’s
near death in quicksand. (Quicksand, of course, is one of the things that improve
any story, and if the greatly missed Bill Crider was still with us, I have a
hunch he would agree.) Anyway, there’s also a good dog in this story, and that
helps, too. “Hangman’s Tree” is almost too grim, but I wound up thinking that
it’s a decent story.

Ben Frank is the pseudonym of Frank Bennett, an author who wrote under his real
name for both the pulps and the slicks in the Forties and Fifties. He was more
prolific as Ben Frank and is best remembered for a back-up series that appeared
in many issues of TEXAS RANGERS featuring a cagey old-timer known as Doc Swap.
He also wrote a comical Western about a deputy named Boo-Boo Bounce. As I
mentioned above, with a few exceptions (Robert E. Howard and W.C. Tuttle come
to mind), I’m not much of a fan of comedy Westerns. I don’t care for the
Boo-Boo Bounce stories at all. The Doc Swap yarns are at least readable because
they’re usually well-plotted. Frank’s stand-alone story in this issue of
THRILLING WESTERN, “One Man Justice” features another old-timer and his attempt
to bring to justice the man who tried to murder his son-in-law. This isn’t a
comedy; Frank plays it completely straight and gives the tale a nice
hardboiled, suspenseful tone, as well as a twist or two. This one took me
by surprise. I wasn’t expecting to like it, but I did, quite a bit.

Robert J. Hogan was the author of G-8 AND HIS BATTLE ACES, of course, along
with a lot of other air war stories, but he also wrote a considerable number of
Westerns. His story in this issue, “Badge for a Bandit”, uses the old plot of
an outlaw trying to go straight. In this case, the young man has even become a
deputy, but then his old gang shows up intending to rob the bank. I generally
enjoy Hogan’s stories, but I never could work up much interest in this one.

The final story is “Heading Into Trouble”, a short, simple yarn about a bank
messenger, a stagecoach driver, and a shotgun guard trying to get a stagecoach
carrying a lot of money through a gauntlet of outlaws. It’s almost non-stop
action, which is good, and the writing is okay. The by-line is the house-name
Jackson Cole, which was often used when an author had more than one story in an
issue. In this case, though, the style doesn’t strike me as being similar to
any of the other authors in this issue. In fact, it reminded me of the work of
Charles S. Strong, an editor at the Thrilling Group who wrote Western fiction
under the name Chuck Stanley as well as detective and adventure yarns under his
own name. That’s just a guess on my part, however. It could have been someone
else who wrote “Heading Into Trouble”. Whoever did, I thought it was an okay
story.

Overall, I’d say this is a below average issue of THRILLING WESTERN. The two
best stories are the Walt Slade novella and Ben Frank’s story, and there are
several I don’t think are very good at all. But considering the sheer number of
Western pulps published, they can’t all be great. I’m confident that I’ll have
better luck the next time I take one off the shelf.

Friday, July 06, 2018

Many people consider the Slocum series, published originally
by Playboy Press under the house-name Jake Logan, to be the first Adult Western
series, but I believe that’s incorrect. The Lassiter series, published under
various imprints by Belmont/Tower/Leisure under the house-name Jack Slade,
started in 1968, eight years before Slocum and included all the elements of an Adult
Western: sex, a gritty, violent tone, and a somewhat amoral protagonist. True,
the sex scenes usually aren’t as graphic as the ones to be found later in
Slocum and other Adult Western series, but they’re definitely there, and the
violence and shades-of-gray characterizations are in full force.

A lot of this goes back to the pulp SPICY WESTERN. As far as I know,
W.T. Ballard, who created the Lassiter series and wrote the first four books,
didn’t write for SPICY WESTERN, but his good friend and occasional writing
partner Robert Leslie Bellem did, and as a prolific professional pulpster,
Ballard certainly would have been aware of the magazine even without the Bellem
connection. So my contention is that the whole Adult Western paperback
sub-genre can be traced back to the pulps and is largely the creation of one
man, W.T. Ballard. (I expound more on this in my introduction to LUST OF THE
LAWLESS, a fine collection of the stories Robert Leslie Bellem wrote for SPICY
WESTERN.)

The Lassiter series ran until 1981 with several different writers
authoring the novels as Jack Slade. The most idiosyncratic of them, at least as
far as his writing style goes, was probably Frank Castle, who turned out the
Lassiter novels SIDEWINDER and THE BADLANDERS. Castle wrote for the pulps and
also wrote several Westerns and crime novels for Gold Medal during the Fifties.
(I think the Gold Medal hardboiled Westerns also had an influence on the Adult
Westerns.) I read THE BADLANDERS a number of years ago, and I have to confess
that I misattributed it to Tom Curry, another veteran pulp Western author who
wrote a couple of the Sundance novels under the Jack Slade name. It’s clearly
Castle’s work, though, as proven by Lynn Munroe.

Which brings us, at last, to SIDEWINDER, which I read not long ago. Lassiter is
a drifting gun-for-hire and sometimes outlaw, and as this book opens, he’s
south of the border in Mexico, being forced to dig his own grave by the firing
squad that’s soon going to execute him. It’s a great opening, and Castle never
slows down the action and suspense as he gives us the back-story while we go
along. It seems that Lassiter was hired by Homer Brill, an American mining
tycoon in Arizona, to travel into Mexico and collect on an I.O.U. that’s owed
to Brill by General Juan Peralta, a local strongman who also owns a gold mine.
Instead of paying the debt, Peralta loses his temper and orders Lassiter shot.

Of course, Lassiter escapes and quickly discovers that all is not as it appears
to be at first. Conspiracies and double-crosses abound. Everybody’s after a
fortune in gold and nobody can be trusted. As you’d expect from a novel set in
Mexico during the late 19th Century, political intrigue and
revolution play large parts in the plot as well. And of course there are a
couple of beautiful women involved, and Lassiter beds both of them when he’s
not busy running around shooting and getting shot—and knifed—and blowing stuff
up real good. Lassiter wants to get his hands on some of that gold, but it’s
even more important to him that he settle some scores with men who crossed him.

Castle has an odd, choppy, comma-heavy, and sentence-fragmented style that
takes some getting used to. Once you do, however, it works pretty well and
produces some vivid scenes. He also has a good grasp on Lassiter’s character.
Lassiter isn’t a typical Western hero, but he has a number of opportunities to
be even less sympathetic but winds up doing the right thing instead. He’s not
necessarily a guy you’d want as a friend, but you certainly don’t want him as
an enemy, because he finds a way to just keep fighting until he wins.

I’d say SIDEWINDER is about in the middle when it comes to the Lassiter series.
I’ve read much better books in the series, but I’ve read worse, too. That may
seem like I’m damning with faint praise, but that’s not my intention. I enjoyed
reading SIDEWINDER, and I think most Adult Western fans would, too. Just be
aware that Castle’s prose is definitely off-trail.

(The image above is my copy, the one I read. There's an earlier edition from 1969, but I don't own that one and wasn't able to find an image on-line.)UPDATE: Here's the cover of that first edition, provided by my friend Kurt Middleman.

Tuesday, July 03, 2018

From everything I've read about him, Ken Maynard was a pretty terrible human being, an alcoholic and abusive to people and animals alike. But that didn't stop him from being a fairly major star of B-Western movies for about a decade, from the mid-1920s when he started in silent films to the mid-Thirties, when his problematic attitude began making it impossible for him to get work except at some of the Poverty Row studios, like Colony Pictures, which produced DEATH RIDES THE RANGE in 1939.In this one, Maynard plays drifting cowpoke Ken Baxter (his characters were nearly always named Ken), who is camping one evening with his sidekicks Panhandle and Pancho when a badly injured man stumbles into their camp. It turns out he's a scientist, a member of a group of foreign archeologists who are supposed to be studying Indian artifacts on a nearby ranch.Well, you know there has to be more to it than that, like maybe the "archeologists" are really agents of a foreign power (since it's 1939 and one of the agents is a tall, aristocratic blond guy called Baron Starkoff, you only get one guess what that foreign power is) and they're after a deposit of helium under the ranch. There are a few other twists, but I won't go into them in case some of you actually watch this movie someday.By this point, Maynard was fairly paunchy, but he could still handle an action scene and do some good riding on his famous horse Tarzan. Why would a cowboy name his horse Tarzan? I have no idea. Ubiquitous B-Western bad guy Charles King is also on hand, and the movie was directed by equally ubiquitous B-movie director Sam Newfield. So you should have a pretty good idea what you're getting in DEATH RIDES THE RANGE. I found it entertaining enough to spend an hour watching it. Sometimes that's all you want.

Monday, July 02, 2018

Late yesterday afternoon I finished my 365th novel. If somebody wanted to read one of my books every day, the project would take a year to finish. I think that's kind of cool. Also, at the time of the fire in 2008, I had written 215 novels, so this means I've turned out 150 in the ten and a half years since then, for an average of a little more than 14 books per year. Admittedly, some of those books were on the short side, but I've also done a great many that were in the 90,000 to 100,000 word range, so I think it all balances out. Mostly I don't like patting myself on the back, but every so often I stop and think, hey, that's not bad.And now, having done that, it's back to work.

Sunday, July 01, 2018

Another great cover by Norman Saunders on this issue of CRIME BUSTERS, and look at the line-up of authors: Walter B. Gibson (writing as Maxwell Grant) with a Norgil the Magician story; Lester Dent (a Click Rush, Gadget Man story); Theodore Tinsley (a Carrie Cashin story); Steve Fisher (a Big Red Brennan story); Frank Gruber (a Jim Strong story); Alan Hathway (a Colby Lyman story); and George Allan Moffatt (a Duncan Dean story). Now, I'm not familiar with all those series characters, but I know the authors and know they could be counted on to produce entertaining yarns. And any pulp with Dent, Gibson, Gruber, Tinsley, and Fisher has got to be good reading!